Blackwater (25 page)

In the old days, people had thought the cuckoo became a hawk when the summer was over. Then he struck with his claws extended, getting his beak bloody. He was calling like a bell in the forest. She was so close she could see the slate-grey throat feathers trembling at each call. He was perched with his wings folded and black tail feathers outspread, spotted with white.

As soon as he had flown away again, she turned and went back towards the houses. The first time she had walked down from the pasture and followed the stream in among the lichen-festooned trees, she had suddenly been frightened right in the middle of a step. Not by any sound, but frightened from within, icily and inexorably warned by an instinct she had never before known existed within her. She immediately turned round and started running back. Once she reached the woodshed, she sat down by the wall so the children wouldn’t see her and stayed there until her breathing had become calm and regular.

They never mentioned what had happened down by the river. Two police officers had walked all the way up from the Strömgren homestead and in Petrus and Brita’s cottage questioned them all again. The children had been left outside in the hot sunshine.

Petrus said afterwards that the fact that they wanted to hear it all over again meant the investigation had ground to a halt. But he had patiently told them the same things he had said when they had been questioned at the homestead. Then they had never mentioned it again.

So it seemed as if it would be possible to live here without thinking about what had happened by the Lobber. What had happened had been an anomaly. Something extraordinary. As if the cuckoo really had become a hawk, just once.

According to Petrus, that one time didn’t even count. Only the tabloid papers blew up the atypical. But Annie wondered whether anomaly might not be the origin of much of what was included in the ordinary scheme of things – in nature, as Petrus called it. Mutations, for instance, she said when they stared at her. Reproached slightly for intellectualising her problems, she cried out, ‘
My
problems!’

At that moment, Dan leant right over his down-at-heel Lapp shoes and she sensed he was struggling with laughter. Again she felt the mixture of cheerfulness and desire that made it almost impossible to sit still listening to the evening’s rundown and criticism. As usual, Dan was sitting in the strong sunlight pouring in through the window, lighting up odd strands in his ash-blond hair. Now, when he was trying to hide his face, his long hair fell like a flood of light towards the floor. Annie had a wild yearning to take it into her mouth. Not later. Now. Now, at once.

But first she wrote something down. She took out her notebook as soon as they had got back to their room because she didn’t want to forget it. The wildly and chaotically unpredictable which formed the basis of new creation in nature must also exist in the world. In civilisation. Was the world really the predictable progression of cultural and economic order now being described? Was it so unlike nature, which could at any time spew or spit out anomalies, wild ones? Was it not also in a sense nature?

The moment passed. Dan gathered his hair up into a ponytail and fastened it with some elastic she had given him so that he wouldn’t wear it out with ordinary rubber bands. She could sense his irritation like kinetic anxiety in the room, glass trembling, books falling down. Though not really, she said to herself, trying to be sober for Mia’s sake, pretending not to notice the shifts of mood of which unfortunately she was all too often the cause.

It didn’t worry her too much that her philosophising irritated him. It implied a certain amount of respect, whereas when Petrus held forth, Dan clearly found it difficult not to laugh. When they were on their own, they couldn’t discuss it. All the same she didn’t really know where she stood with Dan in relation to Petrus. Whatever happened, she was not going to stop thinking in this way, because it was new and gave her some pleasure. It was like swimming or running. Sometimes it occurred to her that this life was ideal: physical labour and reflection, a great deal of staring at clouds and mountainsides, at trees and birds. The smells of sheep and grass. Dan’s warm skin. Water – pure, murmuring, running water. Children’s voices.

Before her inner eye she could see the burnt skin on a child’s back, a girl the same age as Mia. The girl was running along a bombed road, but she was really moving in a pattern, a suffocating order scorching the map of its pattern into her back and arms. Was it like that? Was she part of an order? Annie asked Bert.

He had no objection to talking about it and he replied that she was.

‘And in Cambodia? Is that a new order establishing itself there?’

Her voice had probably been shrill. She saw that in Bert’s brown eyes – doggie brown – rather than hearing it herself. He replied that peasant war was grim. Their order was grim. But then a new order would emerge. A new world.

World? So he meant that there would be peasant wars all over the world and then – a new world?

One morning, Ylja brought his tea and said she had to go up to the car and go and do some shopping. She had brought some extra sandwiches; it seemed she was taking it for granted he wouldn’t go into the house while she was away. But as soon as she started rummaging for money in the centre compartment of her handbag, she would discover he had already done so. After she had left, he would have to make his way up to the road and try to get a lift, however bad his foot.

The fact that he had hit her had not changed the atmosphere between them. She seemed to be neither afraid nor particularly angry. More contemptuous than anything else. But hadn’t she been that all the time?

He lay still for half an hour, then waited no longer. He had to get up to the road and start hitching before she came back.

He took nothing with him except the old staff, the money and his sweatshirt tied round his waist. The mosquitoes were troublesome because he had to go so slowly, he couldn’t much put weight on his foot. The swelling had gone down and it didn’t ache as long as he lay still. But his foot was useless, and he still had to get round the lake to fetch the eel. He wasn’t going to let it starve to death in a rat cage.

He had planned to let it go, but once he had got hold of it, it didn’t seem impossible to take the cage with him up to the road. The eel would be all right for a while out of the water. He tied the cage round his waist and made his way laboriously along the far too soft path. His stick kept sinking in, he lost his balance so that had to put his weight on his foot, and then it started to hurt. It took him an hour to get no further than back to the main path. In an hour or two, she would be on her way back down from the car again, so he would have to listen out for her on the path to give him time to hide before she saw him.

He went on for a few hundred metres. As he sank to his knees, he could still see the lake through the pines and small spruces in the marsh. He had to sit down although the ground was wet. The pain in his foot kept up a slow, steady throbbing. He thought it would pass after resting for a while, but it persisted. At first he could think of nothing except the pain. Gradually he realised he would never get up again. He grew cold from the wet ground and mosquitoes attacked his face and wrists. He felt like a corpse in a sacrificial place of slaughter. But still in pain.

He didn’t hear her coming. Suddenly she was standing there and it was the only time he had ever seen her surprised. He knew his face was swollen and bitten all round his eyes. She might think he had been crying. Perhaps he had, too. The last hour, or hours, had blurred in his mind. He had kept looking at his watch but had regarded time as something static. The lichen swung stiffly in the drought and every breeze had freed his face of insects for a few seconds. The pain in his foot, though, had not stopped, but was throbbing like clockwork, in its own time.

She hauled him to his feet and he was forced to lean on her. When she saw the cage with the eel, she snatched it off him and threw it into the lake. He shouted and swore. Somehow he must have made an impression on her, because she searched around for the line, now caught in the willows along the shore, and hauled the cage back in. But then she didn’t do as he told her, but opened the hatch at the bottom and shook the eel out. Johan caught only a quick flash before the eel had disappeared into the deep, dark water. He considered her unworthy of all his regrets, all his shame over hitting her.

Neither of them said anything as they made their way back, he leaning heavily on her, sometimes thinking she was almost carrying him.

When they got to the grouse shed, he simply wanted to be left alone but he didn’t dare say anything. He kept thinking about the money. She must have discovered it had gone now. But she said nothing. She rummaged in the rucksack and fished out a bottle of colourless liquid with no label on it. He thought she must be very much at home here. People trusted her, otherwise she could never have bought home-brew.

She poured out a drink each and undressed when they had finished it. He sat on the chair by the table, unwilling to look at her.

She took off only her jeans and pants, then got hold of his trousers. She got him to lift his rear and pulled. He did it so that things wouldn’t be any sillier. But it was, all the same; she pulled down his trousers and he did nothing, said nothing at all. His foot ached, the pain sharp, again and again running up from his foot. He thought she ought to understand, but he simply couldn’t say, Leave me alone, it hurts.

He remembered hitting her and wondered how that had happened. Now he didn’t dare even open his mouth. He didn’t really care what she said or thought of him. She had already shown that so many times, though he hadn’t wanted to understand. He had thought he could play with her judgement of him just as he had played with those small reddish-brown lips in her pussy. But she looked at him just as she had done when she’d opened the car door to let him in. If she said something scornful or smutty, something that hurt, he would start crying. That was because he was tired and in more pain than he had ever been in before.

Tears are only fluid, he thought. Nothing but secretion. Like snot, sperm, whatever. But they mustn’t come now. They mustn’t come pouring down his swollen cheeks, now covered with mosquito bites.

She said nothing when she found his prick limp. She ran her forefinger rapidly back and forth, making it strike like a clapper. She seemed absent-minded – or thoughtful. Then, with out warning, she leant over and took it in her mouth. It promptly betrayed him. All the blood in his body seemed to rush there and start throbbing. He could feel the pain in his foot, naked but distant.

She snorted, as if laughing to herself, then she clambered up on to him. He felt cold all the time as she did so. Her movements were measured, her face slightly stiff, not looking at him, her gaze somewhere on the hollow of his neck.

His body refused to obey. He felt desire when she moved, but then he happened to put his foot down hard to accept her rocking thrusts and the pain immediately shot up from his ankle. He could feel nothing except the stabbing and throbbing, his face soon covered with fine sweat which ran down his neck. In the end, he couldn’t keep it up and of course she noticed and at once got up. She acted as if she had finished with him, though he was sure she hadn’t got what she wanted.

She took her rucksack and left without saying anything more. He curled up on the bunk and tried to sleep away the pain in his foot, but it was difficult, he was so thirsty. She had left nothing behind but a newspaper and a new pair of socks, which she had tipped out from the top of the rucksack when looking for the bottle. He realised he would have to go out to drink from the river, but he didn’t know how he was going to manage it.

Morning came with the rain. He heard it in his dreams, the sound of running water growing louder. When he woke, there was no rustle of rain on the roof, but a powerful sound of river water that told him something had happened up on the mountain. Clouds had opened, the rains had come.

He limped out to find the leaves and grass covered with a veil of moisture. The river was singing, and he splashed water over his face and let it pour down over him. He managed to scramble down to the sweet-smelling, mossy ground where the buttercups were still flowering, and put his mouth to the water dancing and swirling round the skull-like stones. He drank and peed. His foot was stiff, but the pain didn’t seem to have woken properly yet. When he got back, his jeans were wet at the bottom and so was his shirtfront. He hung them over the back of a chair and the top bunk and limped out again with the soap. He managed to find a small place on the riverbed free of stones, where he could put his feet, and made sure he was standing firmly in the racing water. Then he washed himself as he had never washed before. The chill of the water at first took his breath away, but he got used to it and started breathing less heavily. Rubbing with his hands, he lathered the soap time after time and washed himself all over, his crotch, under his scrotum, in the crack at the back, his armpits, scrubbing his neck and arms. He squatted down and splashed water over his head, rubbing soap into his scalp and his face until it stung.

The ache in his foot had started up again, aggravated by his movements, but the icy water numbed it. He rubbed himself over once, then a second time, then started all over again. He was really cold now and thought it wonderful.

It was drizzling. He became more and more mobile, apart from his foot, which was thrust down into the sand as if made of china or wood, and he managed to get his head down so far that he could let the water in the deep pool race through his hair.

As he got up again, a squall came and shook the birches along the river. It was a cold, harsh wind blowing down from the mountain, followed by one squall after another, which shook and swirled the treetops. Then the rain came. He cautiously got out of the river and stood on the moss, the cold from the raindrops striking his skin first like needles, then blows, then more and more diffuse, in the end like a kind of heat. He stood with his mouth open letting the water run and run, for the wind had dropped now and the rain was falling straight down, heavy and strong. A curtain of rain was drawn through the trees, a cloak of water over all that was hot and mangled and ragged in the foliage above him, making the lichens swell and move and the moss raise its soft coat. He was clean now, as clean as a rinsed stone.